Memoir | Page 5

planted the cross,
which was our consolation and our safeguard, as there were in this
desert a great number of rattlesnakes and other reptiles no less
dangerous. When we left our retreat we would sometimes step upon
them and would hear the noise that these serpents make with their
rattles.
At last having walked over a great portion of these two thousand acres
of land during the two weeks that we spent there, we left these solitudes
and went down to Philadelphia. [Footnote: It was not deemed advisable
to accept this property, it being almost entirely rock or marsh land.
Besides which it was not suitable for one of our establishments,
communication with other places being too difficult.]
Upon arriving at the town I told the Bishop how well-disposed were the
people whom we had seen, and suggested to him to send some
missionaries there, but he told me that he had none to send. If I had
been free I would have returned at once to labor for the conversion of

these poor people.
After a year of crosses and difficulties in the way of our discovering a
suitable and convenient place for our establishment, we found
ourselves in Maryland, an excellent province, producing all the
necessaries of life in abundance. It is near the sea, and near to the
Potoxen, and not far from the Potomac, two great rivers that add to its
commercial advantages and render it more flourishing. We thought we
had at last found the country in which to succeed in establishing our
foundation. I consulted His Grace the Archbishop of Baltimore, and the
reverend gentlemen of the seminary of St. Sulpice, and in accordance
with their advice, I decided to go there and commence the work. Three
more brothers sent from France by our Reverend Father Abbot, arrived
at this juncture and joined us. We bought the land and set ourselves to
work to cultivate it. We built a house for ourselves, which consisted of
trees placed one upon another--what is called in this country a loghouse.
It was small, being only eighteen feet long, and as many wide. We
shortly commenced another which would serve as a chapel. The
negroes of the country--who are all Catholics--gave us a helping hand
in this work On arriving here we found lodgings in a private house near
our clearing, in which we remained until our loghouse was fit to receive
us.
Maryland produces an abundance of Indian corn, the cultivation of
which is the chief work of the negroes. We subsisted almost entirely
upon this food, with potatoes and occasionally bread; wheat, however,
and buckwheat grow very well. We arrived there at the beginning of the
year 1813, and during the winter we were occupied in cutting down
trees and preparing the land for work in the spring, so that when that
season arrived we had an acre and a half of land under cultivation. Part
of this we planted with potatoes, another part was a garden where we
sowed different vegetables, and we also laid out an orchard of young
fruit trees. So far everything looked well, but when summer came, and
while we were working most zealously we all fell ill with fever, and
many of us were attacked with dysentery. I attribute these maladies to
many causes,--first to the miasma or poisonous vapors exhaled from
newly cleared land, then to the great heat and the bad water that we had
to drink, which, though it had been pure enough in the winter and
spring, had become bad by reason of a multitude of little insects that

were perpetually drowning themselves in it. Another reason that
contributed to render us ill was the number of different sorts of flies by
which we were devoured day and night. There were among others two
species of flies which in this country they call tics. Some of them are
large, others are small, they fasten themselves to the skin and so
penetrate into the flesh that one can only remove them by pulling them
to pieces, even then a part remains and causes an insupportable itching.
We were dying one after another in this place when our Rev. Father
Abbot on his way from Martinique, with several religious, arrived at
New York. He summoned our community to him, as well as that of the
Rev. Father Urbain, which a short time previously had united with ours,
so that these three little communities now formed but one, under our
chief Superior, who thus in a moment effected a foundation such as we
had spent years of fruitless effort endeavoring to establish. Our new
monastery was established in the country near New York, and did
much good. Thirty-three poor children (almost all of them orphans)
were brought up there, and were